Ladders to Literacy is a supplemental early literacy curriculum designed to boost print awareness, phonological awareness, and oral language skills—three areas that research suggests are strongly related to later reading development. The program can be used in inclusive and special education settings. It was developed and field-tested in the mid-1990s with typically developing children, children at risk, and children with disabilities. The second editions have been revised to reflect experimental findings from 1997 to 2004.

Each Ladders to Literacy activity book provides nearly 60 classroom activities designed to facilitate early literacy skills.

The print awareness component consists of activities such as

• looking at picture books
• drawing pictures
• pretending to write
• making lists
• recording measurements or the weather to help children develop symbolic representational abilities and learn about the conventions of representing language in print

The metalinguistic activities consist of activities such as

• hearing and reciting nursery rhymes, rhymed stories, and rhyme production
  
  
• participating in musical activities involving clapping and dancing to syllabic rhythms
  
  
• taking part in functional reading and writing activities that provide opportunities to practice the identification of sounds and phonemes

The oral language activities focus on

• facilitating children’s pragmatic vocabulary and syntactic language
  
  
• having children reconstruct past events, respond to open-ended questions, and provide explanations